The "Elegies for Paradise Valley" are presently eight
in number, and while each poem may be said to be "set" in Paradise
Valley--Hayden's name for his boyhood neighborhood in Detroit--the "Elegies" do
not limn a place as much as they illuminate the ties between kinfolk who are bound as well
to place. In this way, Hayden's "Paradise Valley" is a historical field--a
culture's magic circle--much like the one established in Harper's "Photographs/ Negatives."And, just as Harper (like Ellison, in some measure) deliberately orchestrates his
images so that both birth and burial are contextual properties of photograph and negative,
darkroom and graveyard, human image and apple tree, the antipodes of Hayden's field are
similarly conjoined and disparate because "Paradise Valley" is also a birthing
and burial zone, a vision of the Garden as well as of the Pit of the Fall.

Indeed, it is with images of the Pit that the series of Elegies begins, forcing us to
wonder if the series' narrative vector will chart upward and, if so, in what form the
incremental stops will appear. The first poem is short and taut, a window on a wasteland
infested with race rituals including those cultural carcinogens which, as Ellison's
Invisible Man observed, promote certain phases of blindness:

"Elegies for Paradise Valley," is a poetic treatment of some slice-of -life
ghetto characters he knew. The poem alludes to the taproot of his personality. The
eight-part elegy sets forth his meditations upon his life in Detroit during the twenties
and thirties. In it, he reflects upon the end of a place, a time, a people. It was a place
where, as a boy, he saw a iunkie die in the maggot-infested alley beneath his
"bedroom's window," and it was a place where he recognized the "hatred ...
glistening like tears in the policemen's eyes." Instead of the planned and gentle
introduction of children to the best in a cultural environment that is alluded to in the
"Pestalozzi's fiorelli" phrase, the children in his ghetto were dependent upon
"shelter"that the ordinarily unusual alliance of "Godfearing
elders" and "Godless grifters" jointly provided.

Among these "protectors" was his Aunt Roxie's friend, "Uncle Crip,
" who was a frequent visitor in the Hayden households.

'Elegies for Paradise Valley is a sequence of eight childhood scenes that imply
both an attitude and a story. The most lavishly praised of any poems in the volume, the
sequence begins with the poet's first intimations that he is himself an alien:

[. . . . ]

In part two the speaker describes the 'Godfearing elders, even Godless grifters' as
'Rats fighting in their walls'. The ambiguous 'their' could refer here to the ghetto
landlords, more often White than Black, thus implying that the persona and his people must
struggle to survive in dwellings not their own, or, more inclusively, that the Black
populace is viewed by the rest of the citizenry as an unwanted nuisance in the wafts of
the city edifice.

The child's awareness of himself as alien and of the human mechanism of prejudice which
creates such a status develops further in part seven as the persona recalls his parent's
lore about Gypsies. They 'kidnap you', they had said, and he 'must never play/ with Gypsy
children' who 'all got lice in their hair'. But the as yet unconditioned psyche of the
child suggests the ironic process at work when his own people ascribe to the Gypsies the
same alien status they have themselves: . . .

In a more general sense the poem catalogues the rich assortment of characters who
populated the child's world and filled his imagination with a pageantry of human
possibilities. In part five Hayden resorts to a delightful list of baroque characters
succinctly captured by one-line epithets in the traditional mode of an ubi sunt
elegy: . . .

Uniting these elegies throughout the eight sections is the elliptically told story of
Uncle Crip who is murdered by Uncle Henry. It is Uncle Crip's laughter we hear enjoying
Bert Williams on the victrola; it is his voice that wisely points out to the boy that the
Gypsies grieve as 'bad as Colored Folks', and 'Die like us too'. It is Uncle Crip who
dances with the boy to 'Jellyroll/ Morton's brimstone/ piano on the phonograph'.
Ultimately, however, the poem focuses on the sense of 'guilt/ and secret pain' evolving in
the psyche of the young boy who, in spite of his rigorous Baptist training, is charmed and
enchanted by Uncle Crip's boisterous ways.